The latest issue of the paper L’Urlo della Terra is about to come out and we hope we’ll have it ready for distribution in mid-July.
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Warm greetings and thank you
The editors
In this issue, 40 pages:
– Editorial
– Verso la Grande trasformazione [Towards the Great Transformation], Costantino Ragusa
– Piattaforme di riprogettazione genetica [Platforms of Genetic re-planning], Costantino Ragusa
– Un mondo senza madri? [A world without mothers?], Silvia Guerini
– You have no body – I am your body! Birth, life, death in bio-politics in the 21st capitalist century, Sarajevo, issue 159/a, www.sarajevomag.net (Athens)
– The racist origins of the American technological industry. How the instruments made for carrying out census in the United States added fuel to nazi genocide, internment and racism sanctioned by the state – and helped inaugurate the digital era, Yasha Levine
– The left and the pandemic. The health offer, Salvator Cobo editor of Ediciones El Salmòn and the magazine Polìtica & Letras (Spain)
– Restare umani significa resistere [To remain human means to resist], Silvia Guerini
– Dialogue between Resistenze al nanomondo and Pièces et main-d’œuvre
– Dialogue between Resistenze al nanomondo and Sarajevo
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In their transformative process, fascism and other xxxdictatorships have also always put in place a new way of counting time. Specifically, they started from themselves, from the new era they were about to institute. Over a year after the beginning of the state of emergency, which the former chief of BCE is not yet ready to suspend, we know that nothing will be as it was before. The basic idea is not that of helping humankind to overcome the virus, but rather that of adopting a new paradigm which from now on will set out to govern our lives. Even if no one put forward new ways of counting time, from now on this will be more and more marked and regulated.
More than a few people have seen this period of declared pandemic as a chance to put back many factors into play, in particular those concerning the economy, not a few people have declared the end of capitalism, if not on an international level at least on the Chinese one. But the virus didn’t give and won’t give any new possibility. The virus emergency has only left more and more isolated individuals with an even more disaggregated sense of community. Wherever each one is frantically preoccupied with their own survival there can be no spirit of solidarity because by its nature it cannot start from a distance, this only reproduces itself, solidarity is elsewhere.
During the compulsory closures, thinking of oneself as consumer along with millions if not billions of other consumers, unable to consume and with the illusion of thus being able to affect the market somehow, many thought that the economy would have such a shock as to have to rethink whole processes and consequently it would soon recede. But never was a blunder so big, and not only because of the transfer of purchases online. The system that knowingly orchestrated these closures, disastrous for many small firms, self-employed workers, small productions, workers in certain sectors… has already gone beyond by organizing a future without them. We’ve seen librarians fill up automatic dispensers of books with scrupulous commitment in order to scrupulously avoid human contact, without thinking that those machines will soon become the new librarians, waiting for everything to be transferred online and definitively closing libraries with their printed books.
The process of resetting has no ethics, it is ready to send millions of jobs to the slaughter, to destroy lives, communities, whole countries, without worrying about anything, if not its programs and obviously its own existence. With the first re-openings in March we could hear NUDM shouting in the streets demanding a universal allowance, precisely the one which the perpetrators of the Great transformation are working on. But this allowance won’t be considered in the same way as the old allowance of the eighties in England, which made possible an astonishing explosion of social movements, many young people with a lot of time and a little money. Here the aspect will be different, a document will be given along with precise recommendations of what, where and when to shop, which will only be had under particular conditions of social and probably also health behaviour. They will come to a point where they will scan habits and lifestyles of many people under all aspects, from the most banal to the most important and intimate ones. The citizen’s allowance was an experiment in this sense and it is not by chance that it was Casaleggio’s digital party that proposed it.
If at first China was regarded with hatred as virus spreader par excellence, after their management of the emergency Europe is setting to buy or to make its own [the Chinese] model of system of digital surveillance, which is efficient for both managing the epidemic and controlling any opponents inside the regime. Clumsy attempts such as the immunity app must not lead us to think that the experiment is finished here, the state-of-the-art technologies are all there, what are lacking are only network infrastructures with G5 and G6, while human training between conditioning and distancing is already in full regime.
As after a war we hear them talking about recovery of the economy, the remarkable point is that in this “recovery” they don’t mean the material economy, but the immaterial one which has already started to sweep away entire sectors considered obsolete in order to set off a technological leap where big finance will obviously be the boss. The new direction the market, well-financed and supported everywhere, be it private or public sectors, is taking is that of Big data, automated vehicles, technologies of genetic engineering, digital financial services, telemedicine, the Internet of things, hydrogen, gentrification on a large scale… Therefore for a certain elite in the new change the strong recession linked to closures was only an economic advantage but subsequently also one of management-politics given that its ideologies and visions of the world are being transferred into the agenda of various governments and are being applied punctually. The pandemic has shown that the state of exception, to which governments had accustomed us for a while, has become normality. If at the time of emergency policy due to Islamic terrorism tacit consensus was demanded for ever tighter security policies on a global scale, in the new health emergency they are calling on a precise sense of reciprocal and collective responsibility, which is bound to impregnate our lives completely, in the workplace as well as in our most profound relations. In this sense of responsibility a big deception is hidden, for the techno-health elite this is the keystone that ties us more than ever with precise parameters universally acknowledged: one single language to describe events and only one way to face them. In this sense of responsibility we are very much closer to one another but we have never been so distant from one another.
The efficiency of this instrument lies in the fact that it corresponds to the new model of digital society, where the single individual equipped with their inseparable smartphone has the possibility to find a meaning, they can protect themselves and their loved ones and at the same time they can redistribute their commitment on a social level, which is now well visible and perceptible among masked gazes. If the Immunity app hadn’t been temporarily set aside, we would have found ourselves surrounded by individuals constantly anxious about the result of the scanning of the app on their smartphone. In China similar app models warn with extreme precision of not only the closeness of each single infected individual who is on a database, but also buildings and neighbourhoods where those who are ill or infected are confined, with clear indication to move away from them. Similar models have been used in Israel to register those vaccinated and to discriminate against those who are not. Therefore we have many modalities according to the country, and different rhetoric to promote them.
Just because in Italy they are still stammering over privacy, we must not think we escaped the danger, the ingredients of the new transformations have all these characteristics and are heading in that direction. As the president of WEF Klaus Schwab reminds us, in the future the distinction between countries with high production costs and countries with low production costs, or between established markets and emerging ones, will be smaller. So, it will be important to understand whether the economy is capable of innovating itself. Therefore it is groundless to wonder whether or hope that the system of domination will stop willingly in the combination of its disasters. Rather, to think in this way means once again to cover the system with ethical principles or to believe that there are scientists who won’t go beyond; recent and past history have proved the opposite.
As was foreseeable, the bio-medical deception has found more consensus than resistance and has seen everybody submitting to the state of exception. The limitation of basic rights or their actual suppression has been accepted without blinking an eye. The whole of society has turned itself into a quarantine, with weak and disorientated individuals who almost give thanks for having survived. In the widespread way of seeing normality, people got to the point of believing that the latter would be reached by adopting a sense of responsibility, a normality which for the many actually means not having problems or judgement at work and school and being able to go on holidays. We’ll carry this responsibility like an infection for a long time, certainly until the next edition of Coronavirus for which they are widely preparing us.
After over a year and a half of this situation, what lesson can we learn? Amidst the initial disorientation, who is starting to move on and criticize without fear this transformation, so deep and radical, which is targeting precisely bodies? Certainly still very few and almost always this is done in a partial and sectorial way. The excuse of too heterogeneous a presence in the streets is leading many, above all anarchists, antagonists and leftists to stay away from it denouncing right wing infiltrations; as if infiltrations made by leftists demanding tests and vaccines without patent for all were not also infiltrations, with the difference of confirming the current asset of domination on bodies for a techno-medical society good for pandemics.
The times we are living are certainly strange, probably they need a new way of looking at and understanding reality. What is now a movement from below when in front of it there is a society crushed between a police state on the one side and its own hysteria of biological survival on the other? The question of the so-called vaccines or rather platforms of cell re-planning is no small thing.
These times of vaccine campaigns are important divides, because to confirm or even promote the biotechnological apparatus, among other things without even the authority on the doorstep, is a very clear signal. Even without compulsoriness, many rushed to have a biotechnological serum shot into their bodies; perhaps only the day before they were criticizing Big Pharma, vivisection, power over their bodies. What can have happened? Fear of dying with such low percentages? Fear of losing one’s job? Homologation? Once again the sense of responsibility well instilled in brains? This is the result of not having ever had critical analysis of what science represents and of its convergence in techno-science on bodies, rendered objects of experiment, and over the whole planet. A long-lasting lack of analysis and priority in the struggle which has taken us today to not even have the instruments to understand these processes.
Can a movement of critique of the existent be such without critique of these biotechnological practices? Absolutely not in our opinion, certain drifts fearful even of the simple threats of the system will be certainly considered as accomplices of the society which is outlining itself. Clear ideas and principles are needed concerning the techno-medical dictatorship; during the fascist regime, those who had the courage not to sign Gentile’s education reform lost everything, now confirming education at a distance is leading children and young people to lobotomisation of thought and then thrusting them into the hands of white coats. It makes one think that in many more radical contexts the questions of these “vaccines” and more generally of digitalization are not even being discussed or are discussed along with many other things.
This demonstrates that what is happening is not being understood or if instead it is understood people have already decided what side they are on. These themes of the Great transformation seems to be something that is in the middle, which can be overlooked, but it is not so, any radical critique or simply an anti-system one must necessarily set off from these transformations because the latter are not being carried out to run alongside us leaving us freedom of choice. There is a well-defined agenda and they will try to have it complied with at all costs.
The Great transformation is taking to the extreme a change that has already been present for several years, intervening with new lifestyles and also new approaches to work, which should make those who are still talking about class struggle rethink. Because of digitalization and obviously more unemployment and disorientation, swarms of young and less young have flung themselves towards job opportunities given by internet sites, apps, web platforms, as a completion of the process of work precariousness and automation. Absolutely flexible, with no fixed working hours and available for anything, going beyond the concept of precariousness, the request is permanent service, perhaps while thinking one is one’s own boss free to work at any moment. The network becomes the big factory and digital platforms the new means of production which behind the mask of self-entrepreneurship hide the further exploitation of the worker. The employer becomes the platform, whose property is neither of the worker nor of the community, but belongs to an invisible boss, who makes profits from thousands, millions of individuals who gravitate around an algorithm, with the illusion of being independent.
Any reference so far used to analyse reality is therefore fading away, as the boss dematerialises into the digital and the exploited can only face a wall of algorithms with which it is not possible to discuss and above with which all protests are in vain. The very class analysis is being stabbed to death as the worker himself feels part of the company, as if in a certain sense the immaterial changed the cards on the table by equalising the roles.
Will the worker aworking on the Mirafiori lines producing face masks be able to claim their own rights when it is precisely useless patches against coronavirus that are being produced in various departments? Or will they be treated like an irresponsible defeatist who is not supporting the collective effort of rebirth? And what will become of class struggle or simply resisting when so many productions go towards this and other directions?
One aspect of these times that cannot fail to attract our attention, especially because of the way it has spread in practically every environment is a certain kind of language with its precise words. We refer to “conspiricist” and “no vax”. In times when contents are being given new meanings and when there is loss of sense, these short words allow to express an opinion without having to add anything else or making further analysis and reflections in order to produce a complete thought. They are very commonly used formulas now, but they express practically nothing especially as one can be against or express criticism towards something in so many different ways. There is a difference between affirming that the virus doesn’t exist and affirming what it was possible to do with the excuse of the virus. However everything takes us back to those magic words which as a matter of fact allow in one go to present a demonstration, someone making a speech or an entire movement as something ambiguous, suspicious, especially when they cannot be accused of being of the extreme right. These words, but we could also say these approaches, are just as serious because they nourish disorientation and confusion especially of those who no longer believe in what they see and even less in what they feel, to bring them back into thje fold of scientific rationalism or the alternatives of Cuban vaccines and solidarity apps as soon as possible.
If it is true that much confusion surrounds us, for those who haven’t yet transformed it into a way of life in order never to take a stand especially if the latter is uncomfortable, or to use as an excuse not to act, what is left is to take advantage of seasonal times. We know that to the usual trampling of the planet for tourism purposes corresponds our short opening because we know that this emergency is certainly not over, because they have seen that it works. So we need to throw away the rag that is keeping our mouths shut and go back to meeting again as soon as possible in the heat of the summer, in small and large groups, to get to know each other, to share, discuss and organize a new resistance, which cannot just begin from something alternative, if we are not a problem for them, and we are, they absolutely must be so for us.
